Gabriel's Story Read Free Page A

rhythm. Behind the thin screen of cotton Solomon snored, low and nasal, occasionally mumbling some bit of dream conversation. Gabriel listened to the chorus created between them, punctuated by silences that seemed alive with tiny sounds: coyote songs from the prairie, the scurrying of mice, and, fainter still, the burrowing, grinding noise of some creature, whether within the walls or inside the soddy, he could not tell. He lay there for some time, his eyes probing the wall nearest him.
    Eventually he sat up and slipped from underneath the woolen blanket he and his brother had shared and emerged fully clothed, even down to his shoes. The room was dimly lit. There was a lone and tiny window, and through it came only the faintest indication of light. In the stove, orange embers pulsed and glowed, warm although they gave no flame.
    He stood there like an aged and senile man, looking around him at the foreign world of his own home, until he heard movement beyond the curtain that enclosed the space Eliza and Solomon shared. This spurred him on. He crept over to the door, a wooden thing that neither fully fit the space it occupied nor appeared to have been a door by design. He had to lift it to move it.
    Although sunrise had not yet taken place, it was noticeably lighter outside. The sky had all but cleared of clouds, and the last faint traces of stars were still visible in the west. Gabriel walked away from the house with determined steps, across earth touched by frost. He paused only when he got to the top of a hill. There he turned and looked back.
    The house was a stark silhouette against the eastern glow. It sat small and inconsequential on the landscape. Next to it lay a plot of turned soil, a tiny brown square he could have held between his fingers. He studied this for a moment, and then his eyes drifted on and stared unfocused at the prairie around and behind the house. He had seen such space yesterday and the day before that, but his eyes were not yet comfortable with it. They roamed across it in search of a boundary, a border, an indication that this land didn’t go on forever. No such marker was to be found.
    The lonely call of some creature drifted past Gabriel, a cry part canine and part musical. As if summoned by it, a shape emerged from the house: Solomon. He stood for a moment, taking in the morning, then turned to some task on the far side of the house. Gabriel folded his arms across his chest and stood unmoving. A drop of moisture clung to his nostril. He sniffed to halt its progress but otherwise ignored it. How could Solomon call this a home? His letters, although written in another person’s hand, had promised so much. They had painted a picture of prosperity that bore no resemblance to what Gabriel now saw before him. He silently named the man a liar, one more slur to add to the list that he’d compiled over the long train ride. He trudged back toward the house, firm in his conviction that his mother would also see this fool’s folly. She would look it in the face, turn from it, and flee.
    ELIZA DIDN’T DRAW HER CONCLUSIONS as quickly as her son did. Instead, she listened patiently through Solomon’s tour of the place. There was little to show, but Solomon managed to stretch the tour out with long, detailed descriptions. For each individual thing he began with a lengthy discourse that proved the nonexistence of the object; then he set about building it with words and gestures before the eyes of his listeners. In such a way, the house began as a flat stretch of grass on which could be found naught but buffalo dung. He told of the grasshopper plow and the yoke of three oxen that had cut the sod into fifty-pound bricks. From there it rose, brick by heavy brick, up from the ground and into the building they now had before them. It was a structure unknown in the East but standard in this treeless habitat. The well beyond the rise was dug with words that sought to convey the full import of the